Social life comes to halt in this COVID-19 pandemic. It is expected that COVID-19 will become cyclic epidemic as is flu. Since COVID-19 causes whole body damage to all organs to about 10-20% of the population who are infected with COVID-19, and vaccine, which is under development, is still years away. Additionally, even with vaccine in place, there is still a considerable size of the population that vaccination would not protect, as such, COVID-19 infection would be a social negative factor in the foreseeable future.
Efforts are being made to track COVID-19 infected individuals. An example is a tracking system implemented in South Korea, which uses information of infected individuals in a national data center to locate whereabouts of such infected individuals and digitally warn nearby people to keep a safe distance from the infected individual(s). Reportedly, Google and Apple are working together to generate a voluntary reporting system that functions similarly to what is implemented in South Korea, that is, to warn nearby people of COVID-19 infected individuals.
However, privacy is a major concern in both the South Korean and Apple/Google tracking systems as COVID-19 infection would perceivably carry with it a social stigma. As such, there is a reasonable doubt that the Google/Apple voluntary tracking system would fail.
Therefore, there is a need to have a method and system that can identify the state of COVID-19 infection of an individual such that we can adopt proper social distancing.
The embodiments below address the above-identified issues and needs.